Brokerage Styles and Interaction Rituals in Creative Projects: Towards an Interactionist Perspective on Brokerage

Despite the importance of brokers in creative projects, limited attention has been devoted to the micro-interactions by which brokers induce others’ collaboration while simultaneously retaining some control over creative production. Building on an interactionist perspective, we develop the concept of brokerage style – i.e., a recognizable pattern in the ways in which a broker interacts with others. By using different brokerage styles in different phases of a creative project, brokers can orient the social interactions among project participants, “charging” those interactions with different types of emotional energy and mutual attention, eventually inducing collective collaboration and limiting participants’ expectations of control. We illustrate our interactionist model of brokerage styles with examples from the music and TV industries

Visual Object Tracking in First Person Vision

The understanding of human-object interactions is fundamental in First Person Vision (FPV). Visual tracking algorithms which follow the objects manipulated by the camera wearer can provide useful information to effectively model such interactions. In the last years, the computer vision community has significantly improved the performance of tracking algorithms for a large variety of target objects and scenarios. Despite a few previous attempts to exploit trackers in the FPV domain, a methodical analysis of the performance of state-of-the-art trackers is still missing. This research gap raises the question of whether current solutions can be used “off-the-shelf” or more domain-specific investigations should be carried out. This paper aims to provide answers to such questions. We present the first systematic investigation of single object tracking in FPV. Our study extensively analyses the performance of 42 algorithms including generic object trackers and baseline FPV-specific trackers. The analysis is carried out by focusing on different aspects of the FPV setting, introducing new performance measures, and in relation to FPV-specific tasks. The study is made possible through the introduction of TREK-150, a novel benchmark dataset composed of 150 densely annotated video sequences. Our results show that object tracking in FPV poses new challenges to current visual trackers. We highlight the factors causing such behavior and point out possible research directions. Despite their difficulties, we prove that trackers bring benefits to FPV downstream tasks requiring short-term object tracking. We expect that generic object tracking will gain popularity in FPV as new and FPV-specific methodologies are investigated

Radically Open Strategizing: How the Premium Cola Collective Takes Open Strategy to the Extreme

Whereas prior research has investigated cases of partially open strategizing, this article explores the practices and outcomes of radically open strategizing. We draw on a case study of the German Premium Cola collective to explore how it translates its principles of radically open agenda setting, participation, and governance into strategizing practices. Our analysis reveals that this collective performs radically open strategizing practices of distributed agenda setting, substantial participation, and consensual decision-making, but also performs counterbalancing practices of centralized agenda setting, selective participation, and authoritative decision-making in order to cope with practical barriers posed by information and power asymmetries between members as well as information overload. We find that these practices enable the collective to legitimize its strategic decisions, develop a collective identity, and maintain member motivation over time. Based on these findings, we conclude that radically open strategizing is a feasible practice, with limitations arising from participants making selective use of open strategizing opportunities, rather than being excluded from them

Intramedullary craniovertebral junction metastasis leading to the diagnosis of underlying renal cell carcinoma

Background: Intramedullary spinal cord metastases represent 4–8.5% of the central nervous system metastases and affect only 0.1–0.4% of all patients. Those originating from renal cell carcinoma (RCC) are extremely rare. Of the eight patients described in the literature with metastatic RCC and intramedullary cord lesion, only five were found in the cervical spine. Here, the authors add a 6th case involving an RCC intramedullary metastasis at the C1–C2 level. Case Description: A 78-year-old male patient presented with intermittent cervicalgia of 5 months duration accompanied by few weeks of a progressive severe right hemiparesis, up to hemiplegia. The magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) examination revealed an intramedullary expansive lesion measuring 10 mm×15 mm at the C1–C2 level; it readily enhanced with contrast. A total body computed tomography (CT) scan documented an 85 mm mass involving the right kidney, extending to the ipsilateral adrenal gland, and posteriorly infiltrating the ipsilateral psoas muscle. The subsequent CT-guided fine-needle biopsy confirmed the diagnosis of an RCC (Stage IV). The patient next underwent total surgical total removal of the C1–C2 intramedullary mass, following which he exhibited a slight motor improvement, with the right hemiparesis (2/5). He died after 14 months due to global RCC tumor progression. Conclusion: The present case highlights that a patient without a prior known diagnosis of RCC may present with an intramedullary C1–C2 metastasis. In such cases, global staging is critical to determine whether primary lesion resection versus excision of metastases (e.g., in this case, the C1–C2 intramedullary tumor) are warrante

Analysis of hospitalizations due to intussusception in Sicily in the pre-rotavirus vaccination era (2003-2012)

Background: Intussusception is the most common cause of bowel obstruction in infants with an incidence ranging from 9-328 cases per 100,000 infants aged 0-11 months. Causes underlining this clinical manifestation are still unknown. Possible relationship with a withdrawn tetravalent rotavirus vaccine was not confirmed by post-licensure studies and actually no increased risk of intussusception was found between infants vaccinated with both the recently licensed rotavirus vaccines. Aim of this study is to analyze the intussusception hospitalizations in Sicily from 2003 to 2012 before the introduction of rotavirus universal vaccination and its possible relation with rotavirus gastroenteritis trend. Methods: Were collected data from hospital discharge records occurred from 1st January 2003 to 31st December 2012 in Sicily. Intussusception cases were defined as all hospitalizations with an ICD-9-CM code of 560.0 on any discharge diagnoses. As a proxy for the severity of cases were considered ICD-9-CM procedure codes accounting for surgical or radiologic reduction. Results: A total of 340 intussusception cases were hospitalized in Sicily from 2003 to 2012 in children aged 0-59 months. 46.8 % occurred in the age class 0-11 months. Hospitalization rate for intussusception was 11.4 cases per 100,000 per year (32.6 cases per 100,000 among 0-11 months children; 7.3 cases per 100,000 among 12-59 months children), with a M:F sex ratio of 1.8. During hospitalization only 25 % of intussusceptions had a spontaneous resolution, 56.5 % of cases required a surgical intervention. From 2003 to 2012 intussusception cases were equally distributed during the year without any seasonality, while gastroenteritis hospitalizations due to rotavirus infection have a typically late winter and spring distribution. Conclusions: In Sicily from 2003 to 2012 hospitalizations due to intestinal invagination were higher among children aged 0-11 months with observed rates similar to other European countries. Regional baseline data analysis of intussusception among 0-59 children is recognized as an evidence-based public health strategy by international health authorities. Indeed, this strategy is necessary to compare any post-licensure age or sex-related change in intussusception trend after universal rotavirus vaccination introduction

Concettualizzazione e contestualizzazione dei beni culturali archeologici

This report describes the observations made while developing a new methodology for historic surveys used for the re-contextualisation of archaeological finds. This particular methodology avails itself of both traditional historic surveys as well as the representation of knowledge through ontology. The methodology described here was developed in reference to specific cases of re-contextualisation of archaeological artefacts from Pompeii which are now in the National Archaeological Museum in Naples

The Primordial Soup: Exploring the Emotional Micro-Foundations of Cluster Genesis

Previous research on the genesis of industrial clusters has focused on macro-level (e.g., agglomeration economies, institutions) or meso-level explanatory factors (e.g., serial entrepreneurship, spin-offs). Less studied are the micro-foundations of cluster genesis, intended as the individual- and group-level processes underlying such macro-level outcome. Yet, micro-foundations are key to understand the “primordial soup” of cluster genesis—i.e., the processes unfolding in the early moments of cluster formation, before the first emergence of commercial activity. Through a historical case study of the British Motorsport Valley cluster (1911-1970s), we trace back the primordial origins of this cluster to the casual leisure activities of groups of amateur motorsport enthusiasts who then prompted the professionalization of motorsport racing and its transformation into the business at the core of the industrial cluster. We theorize that clusters emerge through the layering of different domains (casual leisure, serious leisure, business), each made of three elements (actors, activities, artefacts), which interact via two micro-level mechanisms: 1) localizing passion, a shared emotional energy by which people become affectively attached to the spaces where they carry out activities that they enjoy; 2) domain repurposing, the shift of a configuration of actors, activities, and artefacts towards a new purpose, originating a new domain. While domain repurposing induces the transformation of activities from leisure to business (thus originating the industry at the core of a cluster), localizing passion anchors the activities to the same geographical area (clustering the industry). Our key contribution is to explore the emotional micro-foundations of cluster genesis

Forecasting Human-Object Interaction: Joint Prediction of Motor Attention and Actions in First Person Video

We address the challenging task of anticipating human-object interaction in first person videos. Most existing methods ignore how the camera wearer interacts with the objects, or simply consider body motion as a separate modality. In contrast, we observe that the international hand movement reveals critical information about the future activity. Motivated by this, we adopt intentional hand movement as a future representation and propose a novel deep network that jointly models and predicts the egocentric hand motion, interaction hotspots and future action. Specifically, we consider the future hand motion as the motor attention, and model this attention using latent variables in our deep model. The predicted motor attention is further used to characterise the discriminative spatial-temporal visual features for predicting actions and interaction hotspots. We present extensive experiments demonstrating the benefit of the proposed joint model. Importantly, our model produces new state-of-the-art results for action anticipation on both EGTEA Gaze+ and the EPIC-Kitchens datasets. Our project page is available at https://aptx4869lm.github.io/ForecastingHOI